Laura Rowland: The Incense Game

Reiko fought the urge to shriek, Coward! You couldn’t challenge my husband face-to-face. You hid in wait for him, and you tried to kill him and our daughter, and you call it an accident!

“My husband will pardon you if I ask him to.” Her voice shook with her effort to control her temper. “You can go on as if nothing had happened. Your wife and children will be safe.”

His hopeless glance said he wished to believe her but knew her claims were absurd. “I’ve made up my mind. One last person. Then it can stop.”

A mournful relief filled his voice. The spasms in his face ceased; the muscles unknotted. His decision had snapped the tension between good and evil inside him and brought him peace. Reiko thought she felt the child move in her, like a baby bird instinctively trying to escape from a cracking egg. Minister Ogyu rolled his shoulders as if a weight had fallen off them. His confessing to Reiko was akin to dumping his secret into her grave.

“Please have mercy!” Reiko fell forward, her bound hands clasped, and sobbed. “I’m pregnant. Please spare my child. Please let me go!”

Deaf to her cries, Minister Ogyu sat with his hands folded, his face calm; his eyes watched the door. He seemed to be waiting for something.

“Is there another road to town?” Sano asked the village men who’d followed him out of Kasane’s house into the cold night. There had to be, or Minister Ogyu and his men would have had to transport Reiko along the highway and been seen by her bearers waiting at the landslide.

“Yes. I’ll show you,” the doshin said.

The road was a narrow lane that skirted fields and climbed up and down forested hills. Sano and his men rode single file, slowly over rough terrain. Under normal conditions the highway would have been faster, but the back road was freer of obstacles created by the earthquake. Sano and his men reached Edo in half the time it had taken them to travel to Mitake. A temple bell tolled midnight as they came onto the main street through town.

Sano floated in a fog of pain and dizziness, fear and exhaustion. He dozed, then woke to see a rubble-strewn landscape lit by his men’s lanterns and the stars and moon in the black sky. The procession had stopped.

“Is this the Saru-waka-cho theater district?” he asked.

“My sense of direction says so,” Marume said, “but I don’t see anything I recognize.”

Neither did Sano. Where once great theaters had stood amid teahouses, restaurants, shops, and houses, now broken walls rose from deserted ruins. The homeless actors, musicians, directors, and stagehands had moved to the tent camps. Dogs howled. Windblown debris skittered. Riding through the district, Sano and his men came across signs of bygone gaiety. Atop rubble piles lay strings of crumpled red paper lanterns from the eaves of teahouses. Sano’s horse trod on a broken samisen. A square wooden tower, from which drummers had once summoned theatergoers, lay in pieces. None of the buildings appeared whole or inhabited. Sano’s party located the main street, which was blocked in both directions by collapsed theaters. Sano felt a growing desperation.

Where in this shambles had Minister Ogyu taken Reiko?

Was he already gone and she already dead?

Minister Ogyu waited, still and detached and ominously calm. Reiko was bathed in sweat from the effort of straining against her bindings. The rope around her ankles loosened, but her wrists remained tightly secured. Minister Ogyu turned his head. She lifted her wrists and gnawed the rope; its coarse fibers abraded her mouth as she worked at the knot. Then she heard the footsteps and voices that had drawn his attention away from her. His men were returning.

Reiko hastily lowered her wrists. The four men marched down the gangway. They had another man with them, a young stranger with purple bruises that stained his cheeks, swelled his mouth, and circled his eyes. “What am I doing here?” he asked Minister Ogyu. He didn’t notice Reiko. “Can I go now?”

“No. I’m not finished with you.” Minister Ogyu beckoned his men.

They brought the stranger onto the stage. Ogyu’s men surrounded him closely, and Reiko saw that he was as much a prisoner as herself. While Ogyu and the other men were occupied with him, she chewed at the rope around her wrists. The knot began to fray.

“But I already told you, Madam Usugumo didn’t tell me anything about you,” the stranger protested. “Thank you for breaking me out of jail, you saved my life, and I appreciate it, but what more do you expect me to say?”

Reiko froze in astonishment, her teeth clenched on the rope. The stranger was Korin, Madam Usugumo’s apprentice. Minister Ogyu must have wanted to find out if Korin knew his secret and taken him from the jail to question him here. Apparently Korin didn’t know. But why, then, had Ogyu kept him? Reiko deduced the answer. Ogyu wasn’t convinced that Korin really didn’t know his secret and therefore was unable to let Korin go free; but he hadn’t killed Korin because he hadn’t yet made the decision to resort to violence.

The young man spied Reiko. He smiled at her; his eyes twinkled roguishly. “Well, hello. Who are you?”

“She’s Lady Reiko,” Minister Ogyu said. “Chamberlain Sano’s wife.”

Reiko intuited that neither she nor Korin would survive this night.

“It’s an honor to make your acquaintance.” Korin bowed gallantly, then frowned, turning to Minister Ogyu. “Hey, why is she tied up?”

Reiko shouted, “Run, Korin!” Maybe she could save him, even if she couldn’t save herself and her child.

He gaped in surprise, then bolted. He was quick, but his pause had cost him a critical moment. As he ran down the gangway, Minister Ogyu’s men pounded close on his heels.

“Don’t let him out!” Minister Ogyu said.

Reiko wriggled to the foot of the stage, rolled off, and fell into the nearest seating compartment with a bone-jarring crash. The dividers were long wooden beams, supported at intervals by wooden panels that were perpendicular to the floor. Wriggling between the panels, Reiko heard a thud on the gangway and a yell as the men tackled Korin.

Ogyu shouted, “She’s getting away! Catch her!”

His men ran along the dividers. The lanterns they carried flashed light over Reiko. Angling through rows of compartments, she felt like a mouse she’d once seen in a maze at the Ry o goku Bridge entertainment district.

“There she is!” Jagged Teeth called.

He jumped down and seized her. She writhed and fought, but two other men joined him. They boosted her up onto the gangway, carried her to the stage, and dumped her at Minister Ogyu’s feet. While Reiko lay gasping, Ogyu merely glanced at her. He seemed devoid of emotion now that she was captured. Winsome Smile and another man held Korin by his arms.

“Why are you doing this?” Korin struggled and kicked. “What do you want with me? Or her?” He jerked his chin at Reiko.

“You lured her here,” Minister Ogyu said.

“What?” Surprise halted Korin’s struggles. “It wasn’t me who brought her.”

“It was you.” Minister Ogyu spoke in a quiet monotone that was more frightening to Reiko than any angry threat. “Because she knows you poisoned Madam Usugumo and Lord Hosokawa’s daughters.”

“I didn’t poison anybody!” Korin cried.

“You lured her here to kill her,” Minister Ogyu said. “So that she can’t tell her husband or Lord Hosokawa that you’re guilty and you won’t be put to death.”

“I’m not guilty! I don’t want to kill anyone! I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

Comprehension stunned Reiko. Minister Ogyu meant to settle the blame for the poisonings on Korin. He’d also solved the problem of how to eliminate her and avoid the consequences. He was going to frame Korin for her murder.